How The Fugitive’s Heart-Pumping Finale Changed TV Forever

David Janssen as Richard Kimble and Bill Raisch as One-Armed Man in “The Judgment,” the series finale of The Fugitive, 1967.

From Everett Collection.

ACT I

August 29, 1967, was “the day the running stopped” for Richard Kimble, who had spent four seasons searching for justice on ABC’s gripping drama The Fugitive. The previous week, audiences had eagerly tuned in to Part I of “The Judgment,” the series finale that promised to resolve the existential plight that made Kimble—falsely accused of murdering his wife and sentenced to death—into a mythic hero around the world. (Decades later, it would also inspire the Oscar-winning 1993 Fugitive feature film, starring Harrison Ford.)

In Part I, the elusive One-Armed Man, whom Kimble had seen fleeing the scene of the crime, was arrested after a strip-club brawl—then mysteriously bailed out of jail by a corrupt bail bondsman with blackmail in mind. The bondsman asked point-blank if he had killed Helen Kimble. “No,” the One-Armed Man replied, “but I was there and saw the man who did.”

Which prompted my older brother, who was watching the scene raptly next to me, to dramatically intone: “All of America was waiting to hear him say that.”

He wasn’t wrong—though the hubbub must have been a surprise to the ABC higher-ups who had to be convinced that a series finale was even necessary. If it were up to them, Kimble would have kept running forever—would never have found the One-Armed Man, would never have cleared his name. After all, The Fugitive was just a television show. No resolution? No problem.

“The Judgment,” however, ended up becoming a television milestone; for more than a decade, it held the record for most-watched episode in history. And even 50 years later, its legacy can still be seen in the much-hyped finales of beloved series whose fans demand proper closure—and in the outsized reactions to those finales, from the ecstatic (Cheers, Friends) to the savage (How I Met Your Mother) and fiercely debated (Seinfeld).

ACT II

The Fugitive’s fourth season was going to be its last. “Television shows come and go, and this was going to go,” Leonard Goldberg, then ABC’s vice president of programming, tells Vanity Fair. “As we got closer to the final episode, a friend said to me, ‘What’s going to happen? Who [murdered Kimble’s wife?] Did they catch him?’”

In the series’s penultimate episode, shown back on April 11, 1967, Kimble was still a man in exile, holed up in a dying hermit’s mountain cabin. “I want to stop running,” Kimble told his benefactor. “You’ll never stop running,” the benefactor ruefully responded.

After the episode aired, though, “I realized we were going to leave viewers empty-handed, and that was wrong,” Goldberg, 83, says. “I went to the [higher-ups] at the network and said, ‘We have to give people a conclusion.’” Some execs worried that a final episode would hurt The Fugitive in syndication; others argued that closure wasn’t necessary because viewers knew The Fugitive was just a television show. To the latter, Goldberg responded, “But they are deeply invested. This is our business; we are selling advertisers on the power of television, and yet we ourselves don’t believe it? That seems odd.”

Goldberg says the network ultimately gave the go-ahead on the condition that the sales team sell the finale to advertisers at their fall rate, even though the episode would be broadcast in August, opposite summer reruns. The sales team was enthusiastically on board—so much so that when Fugitive producer Quinn Martin said he needed two full hours, they easily sold out a second block.

Created by Roy Huggins, The Fugitive premiered September 17, 1963. The premise: en route to death row, a train wreck frees Kimble, who sets off in search of the One-Armed Man. Meanwhile, Kimble is relentlessly pursued by Lt. Philip Gerard (Barry Morse), the Javert to his Jean Valjean. Each week found the haunted and hunted Kimble in a new town with a new name, inevitably becoming embroiled in some stranger’s personal drama that unfolded in four acts.

“You were really hooked into the fix on that show like no other,” Michael Zagor, a co-writer of the final episode, told the Chicago Tribune while remembering The Fugitive in 1994. “Everybody’s fantasy as a little kid is, what would you do if you were falsely accused? Where would you go? Where would you run?”

An urban myth at the time speculated that there actually existed a secret episode in which Gerard was revealed to be the killer. In a pre-taped interview that aired on the late-night talk show The Joey Bishop Show following the series finale, Bishop asked Janssen to reveal the killer’s identity. “[Kimble] killed her, Joey,” Janssen joked. “She talked too much.”

Really, though, Zagor and his co-writer George Eckstein knew from the start that there would be no tricks in this finale—that Kimble would confront the One-Armed Man, and Gerard would ultimately be convinced of Kimble’s innocence. But first they had to put Kimble through the wringer, with Gerard taking Kimble into custody to conclude part one.

“I’m sorry,” Gerard told him. “You just ran out of time.”

Barry Morse as Lt. Philip Gerard and Jacqueline Scott as Donna Kimble Taft in "Home is the Hunted," 1963; Janssen and Morse in the “The Judgment, Part I.”

From ABC Photo Archives/Getty Images.

ACT III

After a prolific career that has spanned some 60 years, Diane Baker could be asked about any number of movie and television milestones: The Diary of Anne Frank, working with Alfred Hitchcock on Marnie, They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar, a much-loved 1971 episode of the anthology series Night Gallery, and a small but impactful role in Silence of the Lambs. But she had no idea that she would become a part of television history when she was tapped to guest star in “The Judgment” as Jean Carlisle, a woman from Kimble’s Stafford, Indiana, hometown who comes to his aid as he closes in on the One-Armed Man. “It was about the work,” Baker says now. “I was an actor for hire.”

Jacqueline Scott, another prolific character actor, guest-starred in four Fugitive episodes, including the finale, as Kimble’s sister. “A lovely experience” is how she describes the recurring role. “The producers said that David and I had the same crazy eyes.”

She recalls Janssen, who died of a heart attack on February 13, 1980, as “a very funny man. He looked like a big, handsome movie star, but he had a crazy sense of humor and he was very sweet. The only thing about that show was the long hours. Quinn Martin wanted the production values and didn’t mind paying. Many times the crew was working eight, 10, 12 hours a day.” After four years of that grueling schedule—the series aired 30 episodes each season—“they and David were just worn out.”

But all of their effort ultimately paid off in spades. “The Judgment” ends with the One-Armed Man dead, and Kimble exonerated, embarking on a new life with Jean.

A happy ending? Not quite. A police car pulls up beside him, and Kimble visibly flinches, indicating that he will probably be looking over his shoulder for years to come. It was an ending that fit perfectly with the show’s film noir sensibility; where an innocent man cannot count on or trust the police, and so-called upstanding citizens and institutions are shown to be rotten to the core.

ACT IV

It turned out that my brother was not far off: the numbers for the August 29 broadcast were “incredible,” says Ron Simon, curator of Television and Radio at the Paley Center for Media in New York. The finale garnered a 72 percent share—meaning that of the people watching TV that night, almost three-quarters were watching The Fugitive.

Which was odd in a way, Simon noted—because though The Fugitive was an Emmy winner in its third season, it wasn’t a top-rated series anymore. “It was only in the top 10 for its second year,” he says. “By the third and fourth season, the show wasn’t gathering momentum.” Still, he adds, the series “meant so much to so many people, although they weren’t following the series over the course of its four seasons,” that it was only natural for them to tune in to see how it would be resolved.

Part of it was the empathy viewers felt for Kimble. “It is an archetypal character, the loner as seen in westerns,” Simon says. “For the counter-culture at the time, he represented the man besieged by the establishment [who] had to live underground. [For others,] it was a Hitchcockian situation where the falsely accused must right the wrong against him.”

The Fugitive’s finale may have also benefited from an unusually uneasy zeitgeist. “The summer of ’67 began with the Summer of Love and Sgt. Pepper,” Simon explains, “but it faded into riots in Detroit and Newark. Cities were burning and the country was on edge. It needed some type of resolution.”

Whatever the reason, the finale was a global sensation. Scott, a Missouri native, says she heard that the episode’s reveal (yes, the One-Armed Man did it) was announced during a St. Louis Cardinal baseball game. Baker remembers the episode being broadcast in Spain while she was filming Krakatoa: East of Java; soon, she was besieged by reporters.

The final episode of The Fugitive became a hot commodity among visitors to the Paley Center—then known as the Museum of Broadcasting—particularly those who had been out of the country when it was originally broadcast. “Many Vietnam soldiers came to the museum in the mid-70s to see the final episode,” Simon said. “That was one of our most highly-requested shows.”

Epilogue

Baker, 79, currently teaches acting at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and is developing a documentary project about the history of America. Revisiting The Fugitive recalls “special days” of quality shows that were distinguished by good writing. “It was exciting to be involved with such a prestigious series [and especially] the last episode,” she says. “But it really was about the work for me.”

While Scott, 85, was well established in television when she took her Fugitive role, her involvement in the final episode gave her career a “wonderful” boost, she says. “It put you in a while different category of availability.”

And by the way, she’s still available. “I’ve had a whole career that goes in patches,” she says. “I’ll do absolutely nothing and think, ‘That’s the end of that,’ and all of a sudden something wonderful will come up. I’m going through a dry patch now, but I’m not worried.”

In The Fugitive’s age, TV wasn’t big on closure; Gilligan, the Skipper, the Movie Star, and the rest were still stranded on Gilligan’s Island when that series ended less than a week after The Fugitive signed off.

But “The Judgment” changed everything. It hit all of the series’s primal and visceral sweet spots—setting Kimble free without letting him completely off the hook. Its unprecedented viewership—it held the record for the most-watched TV episode until November 21, 1980, the night America learned who shot J.R. on Dallas—subsequently “taught a very important lesson to the entire broadcast and advertising communities,” says Goldberg: “that television had that power to get into people’s lives, and that on a certain level, it is real to them.”

Which explains why TV audiences have grown to expect popular shows to tie up loose ends before they conclude, thanks in large part to The Fugitive. As it turned out, viewers didn’t just want to see Kimble stop running; they also wanted to see him hit the finish line, with his life reclaimed.